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Friday, April 15, 2005

I'm sitting back, sipping on pinot noir, munching chilli tim-tams, and instead of mellowing out I'm quietly dreading tomorrow. Today, you see, is my last day as a smoker. Before I go to bed tonight I will destroy my remaining cigarettes. Tomorrow I need all my strength.
Perhaps I should certify the butt from my last cigarette and sell it on trademe. LOL.
I was reading before about how internet auctions are driving conventional auction houses out of business. Apparently Dunbar Slone has had to cut staff. As usual with our media they addressed it from the most superficial angle. Basically they took Dunbar Slone's statement and got a couple of tame "experts" on the internet to say that internet auctions are fun.
It used to be that auctioneers took 10% of the sale price, and they took it from the seller; then they started to get greedy. They both increased their cut and demanded a "buyer's premium", so whatever you bid, you had to pay more. Last time I bought something through an auctioneer I had to pay 10% of the total price (including GST) and then pay GST on the 10%. This was on top of the seller's premium, which was probably the same. So the auctioneer with no capital tied up in stock was getting something over 20% of the sale price.
I've also sat in auctions where the auctioneer decided the auction was moving to slowly & suddenly combined several lots together & knocked them down to the first bid.
The final reason I have for not attending real auctions is that if I'm interested in lot 300, I have little idea what time I should arrive, and I don't want to sit through 2 or 3 hours of watching things I have little or no interest in being sold.
I don't go to auction houses any more. They misused their near monopoly position, and lost my trust. They are overpriced and inefficient.
On the other hand, with internet auctions, the auctioneer doesn't get bored and combine lots, I don't have to wait for other lots to be sold and the fees aren't so greedy.
In the news in recent days has been the story of the auction of the last cigarette legally smoked at one Auckland bar. Very much following on from what I said the other day, here's an example of the same story being reprinted nearly verbatim around the world.

Used cigarette sells for $6948
NEWS.com.au, Australia - 9 hours ago
A CIGARETTE butt said to have been salvaged as a souvenir before a smoking ban has been sold in an Internet auction in New Zealand for $NZ7475 ($6948). ...Sale of $7475 [cigarette] end leaves bidders gasping
New Zealand Herald, New Zealand - 15 hours ago
by David Eames. A cigarette butt auctioned on the internet has smashed visitor-number records at the TradeMe auction house on its ...NZ cigarette butt sold for $5,300
BBC News, UK - 21 hours ago
The remains of a cigarette smoked in the final seconds before New Zealand's smoking ban came into force has been sold for more than NZ$7,400 ($5,300). ...Last remnants of smoking New Zealand for sale
Independent Online, South Africa - 23 hours ago
Wellington - A cigarette smoked in the dying seconds before New Zealand's smoke-free laws came into effect in 2004 is set to fetch more than NZ$7 500 (about ...Cigarette butt on auction for $5,400
AZ Central.com, AZ - Apr 13, 2005
WELLINGTON - A cigarette smoked in the dying seconds before New Zealand smokefree laws came into effect last year is set to fetch more than $5,400 in an ...Cigarette Butt on Auction for $5,400
Reuters - Apr 13, 2005
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A cigarette smoked in the dying seconds before New Zealand smoke-free laws came into effect last year is set to fetch more than NZ$7,500 ...Cigarette butt on auction for more than 2,000 pounds
Reuters.uk, UK - Apr 12, 2005
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A cigarette smoked in the dying seconds before New Zealand smokefree laws came into effect last year is set to fetch more than NZ$7,500 ...Cigarette butt sells for R33 300
Mail & Guardian Online, South Africa - 19 hours ago
A cigarette butt said to have been salvaged as a souvenir before a smoking ban has been sold in an internet auction in New Zealand for NZ$7 475 (about R33 300 ...Cigarette Butt on Auction for $5,400
ObviousNews.com, Canada - Apr 13, 2005
The butt, witnessed as smoked at 11:59 pm on Dec. 9 by the owners of an Auckland bar, has exceeded its NZ$1 reserve price by NZ$7,574 ...Cigarette butt on auction for more than 2,000 pounds
ObviousNews.com, Canada - Apr 12, 2005
The successful bidder when the auction closes on Thursday will also get a certificate of authenticity and a mounted display case. ...NZ cigarette butt on auction for $5,400
Reuters India, India - Apr 12, 2005
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A cigarette smoked in the dying seconds before New Zealand smokefree laws came into effect last year is set to fetch more than NZ$7,500 ...

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

It's been a few days since I last posted here. The title of the blog is "An occasional diary" and I always intended the occasional. As always I've been busy. So what else is new?

Work

There was a bit of a management vacuum with the rush project. All four teams had some work to do on it, and nobody was acting as overall co-ordinator. To get the Finance work done I needed some bits of the Systems work done first, and nobody from Systems was available for a couple of days when I wanted to start. Rather than wait I got agreement from Steve & did that part of his work.
Production also depended on that work & with no obvious volunteers I established communications with Aus about delivery to us of installation databases we could test against. Next thing I knew I was acting as a defacto project manager, and the expected happened. So a fair amount of the last week has been spent doing the not-so-much fun part of project management - plans, resourcing, Gantt charts and so on. Yuck! Come to think of it, are there any fun parts to project management? In other words, work is strictly business as usual.

I mentioned a few days ago that I'd set-up AucklandToday.com. In theory the site is strictly stock-in-hand, but I've been writing the odd news item here and there. I'm also mining a rich vein of legal content, media releases. These are lumps of text where people or organisations say what they want people to hear about their product, their company, their political views, and so forth. Sometimes they are pretty much factual reports of something they want to tell the world about, sometimes they are just adverts in sheep's clothing.

Where they look like being reasonably factual, and about Auckland of course, I add them to the site with full credit. Interestingly enough, I'm not the only one playing this game. Scoop.co.nz is very open about the fact that they publish a lot of press releases, verbatim; they see it as part of their site's unique sales proposition. At the other end of the scale are the big media. We've always see the NZPA or Reuters bylines in papers, but now thanks to the internet we can see what this actually means. A few minutes following links from Google News quickly show that dozens of papers around the world have the same text for a large proportion of their content. They're just printing what they are sent. Obviously they each decide which of the various articles they are given they will use, but for the material they don't write themselves, that's about it.

Political media statements are interesting, I wouldn't print one verbatim, but cutting and pasting quotes from two or more of them to make the guts of a story can be quite fun. I get the feeling that a lot of the reports in the media are produced in a similar way. My entry into the world of low-budget journalism seems to be business as usual.

Finally, there's headlines. When I see something about Auckland and don't have time or energy to do an article on it I just take a brief quote with a pointer to the original article, tack on a headline (usually the original one) and add an entry into AucklandToday.blogspot.com, my other, other, blog. Naturally I provide pointers to all the AucklandToday.com articles too.

Politics

Political media releases are an interesting sub-gendre. Whatever the government does, Act and National savage it. I don't expect any better from National, but Act started out as a party of principles, committed to the Liberal viewpoint. Over the last few years it's downplayed its principles in public in favour of cheap points scoring, chasing the sound bite and becoming progressively more like the conservative rump of the National caucus. I used to say there were only 3 parties in New Zealand worth voting for: The Alliance, The Greens, and Act; all parties that stood for something. Now Alliance is history, Act seems to have lost its way, and only the Greens remain. I find this sad for New Zealand. I could never vote for the Greens, I agree with many of their environmental policies, but I could never agree with some of their more extreme socialist views.

Today's effort, and it's strictly business as usual. There's been a big fuss in recent weeks about the planned new electricity transmission lines to power Auckland, and how it was going to force farmers to give up their private property to make the transmission corridor. Today the Government backed down a bit.
The New Zealand Herald reported

Energy Minister Trevor Mallard has written to the Electricity Commission demanding it consider other options to the pylons proposal to meet Auckland's power needs.
There has been strong opposition to a line of pylons from the Waikato.
Mr Mallard has now said the commission should carry out an "independent and wide consultative process" when considering Transpower's proposed new grid upgrade from Whakamaru to Otahuhu.

The state-owned monopoly has been studying national grid options for 10 years and all of a sudden the Government is telling it to go back to square one and start again."

and so on.

Council dog control fails, woman attacked

"A woman walking past a house in Owairaka yesterday when a Staffordshire terrier cross and a Rottweiler cross attacked her and pinned her to the ground. The dogs were not confined to the property.

"The dogs have a history of aggressive incidents and the owners have received a number of infringement notices for failing to control the animals. One of the dogs has been classified as menacing, and as such has to be neutered and muzzled in public; the other is in the process of being classified."

I took those two paragraphs out of context from the article. One was at the top, and the other at the bottom. This wasn't just a good dog turning bad, these dogs had been trouble before. Why did the Auckland council dog control permit these dogs to be kept? Why were they permitted to stay on an unfenced property?

To me the real crime here wasn't so much the dog owners, as the negligence by the authorities allowing the public to be put at risk, and the sad thing is it happens all the time at all levels of society. Every election politicians talk about "Law and Order" and then for three years it is put in the too hard basket. Meanwhile on the odd occasion a conviction is obtained, we see dangerous criminals back on the streets within hours. The criminal underculture has been taught that they will simply get away with it. The sad thing is they usually do; burglars, dangerous dogs, unlicenced drivers, you name it, they ignore the law, and the people who are supposed to protect us are doing nothing except talk about it. For both sides, strictly business as usual.

Shrug. It came up for Auction; I use and recommend Firefox; It's been a bit painful finding add-ins for New Zealand search, etc. So I bid on it & won. Now to do the site justice.
I've installed Mambo & found a theme that wasn't too blinding. Done some basic configuration, now to track down enough content that it doesn't look the idiot son of the open source movement.
Strictly business as usual.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Despite the way the rules go into the procedure if a non-cardinal (or even a non-priest) is elected, we all know that the next pope will actually be one of the current cardinals, and there's been a lot of talk about St Malachy / Malachi and his predictions of the next pope.

If none of the recent sedevacantist claimants to being a Pope counts as an anti-pope, then the next pope's Malachian motto would be Glory of the olive. If one is a genuine anti-pope then his motto will be Peter the Roman.

It seems to me that the Malachy prophesy can be tested on this point. There's only a hundred and seventeen cardinals under the ages of 80. Two have been excused attending because of poor health, so there's only 115 possibilities for the next pontiff.

So, here's the challenge. Before the cardinals choose the new pope, pick the one to whom each of the two possible mottos best applies. Then see if the cardinals agree with you.

If you feel that 115 people is too many to investigate, there's about 8 or 9 who have been suggested as likely candidates. Pick a couple of them & a random outsider. Post your analysis here, so others can pick different cardinals.